Customer service responses: Don’t take ‘no’ for an answer

When dealing with professional services, such as domain registrars, the customer is – almost – always right.

In a customer-oriented world, a customer’s needs are usually manageable and relatively minute; the approach should therefore be positive, versus negative.

By telling the customer that “we cannot do this now” or “you will have to wait” until a later time for something that needs to be tackled with urgency, a customer gradually loses faith in the products and services they pay for.

However, the customer often never asks for the service provider’s intervention, or the escalation of support. This is because by nature, we aren’t ‘aggressive’ to the extent of ‘demanding’ something; we are usually brought up being polite and understanding, patiently awaiting the course of things.

Unfortunately, in today’s world of cut-throat business, time is of the essence – most of the time!

By asking for a manual intervention to an automatic process, and by asking a customer service representative to step in and take ownership of a time-pressing situation, we are ensuring that any issues we’re facing on a business level are managed efficiently and expeditiously.

On that note, GoDaddy’s inbound domain transfer service sometimes fails to acquire the proper contact email from the WHOIS. A transfer process to GoDaddy can get stuck for hours – even 48 hours – until the automated script times out.

This is an example when one should pick up the phone and explain that the matter needs to be addressed. In my case, a set of authorization codes were given a short life-span; if I were to wait 8-12 hours for the ticket to be processed, I would have lost that window of opportunity.

The GoDaddy representative was trained to respond that I should wait until the automated process times out; at that point, I explained that such a process requires a manual intervention and a simple WHOIS lookup.

While my phone waiting time was longer than usual at 20 minutes, at the end of the conversation I was able to receive the notification emails for the transfer manually.

Long story short: don’t take no for an answer, and if you face resistance always ask for a logical intervention from the tech support personnel – all while remaining polite, yet firm in what you want to achieve.